Is Chicken in Your Grocery Cart? A New Site Can Help

A new site called Buying Poultry is planning to create a new app for consumers who want to purchase humanely raised poultry products. It will list every poultry producer and poultry certification organization in the country and will tell you how they treat their animals.

The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act is the only federal law that protects farm animals at slaughter. But chickens and turkeys are excluded from this law. Even free range, pastured, and organic birds can be paralyzed and slaughtered while they are still conscious. Factory farmed birds often have their beaks cut off, can be confined in tiny cages, and starved to regulate their egg production. Today’s chickens are also fed non therapeutic doses of antibiotics that increase their growth rate to five times faster than 50 years ago, which has devastating effects on their health. And the health of animals that we eat has a direct connection to food safety.

Poultry is the number one vehicle of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. Poultry products caused 452 outbreaks of food poisoning in the period of 1998 to 2010, causing 6,896 illnesses. Pathogens routinely found in chicken include Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens. A report by the Humane Society found that “high stocking densities”, which is the fancy phrase for factory farms, “has been associated with an elevated risk of infecting farm animals with a number of parasites and pathogens that can affect humans.” In addition, improvements in animal welfare reduces infectious disease incidence, pathogen shedding, and antibiotic resistance.

Buying Poultry is working with poultry farmers who take the welfare of their animals seriously as well as animal welfare advocates.